Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America(old.reddit.com)

92 points by dviola 3 hours ago | 29 comments

raincole 27 minutes ago |

OS X: 21.14%

macOS: 8.6%

Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself.

Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

prologic 17 minutes ago | |

Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing?

> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.

kelnos 12 minutes ago | | |

I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?

yoyohello13 26 minutes ago |

These threads are always funny. Nothing makes HNers happier than shitting on Linux for some reason.

sublinear 23 minutes ago | |

And increasingly, reposting crap from Reddit.

vector_spaces 5 minutes ago | | |

I recently googled the phrase "German Jews who voted for NSDAP" after seeing it mentioned in passing

The AI overview contained the construction "Consensus on Reddit is..."

What a time to be alive, I guess

bigfatkitten 1 hour ago |

The separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.

wmf 1 hour ago | |

The last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.

kelnos 11 minutes ago | | |

Regardless, they're the same OS, so any serious (read: competent) person compiling stats like this would combine them into the same bucket.

Caligatio 1 hour ago | | |

I haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent.

I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.

toplinesoftsys 38 minutes ago |

Yes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.

kibwen 26 minutes ago | |

It's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even want to be in the consumer desktop OS market anymore, they'd rather pivot to being pure B2B like IBM did. Likewise, it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification and infantilization of their OS until it will eventually be useless for anything except developing iOS apps. So neither major player will bother spending a marketing budget to reverse this trend; they'd rather not play the game at all. On the flipside, fewer and fewer people will have traditional desktops in the first place; owning only a phone and no PC at all is the new normal.

lukevp 10 minutes ago | | |

What have they iOSed about macOS? The latest versions haven’t lost any features as far as I’m aware. But Windows lost the ability to even pin the task bar to the side of the window in Windows 11… and the ability to stop auto updates.

If anything, iOS is getting more Mac-like, especially the iPad version. It has multi windowing and a window manager now.

andsoitis 9 minutes ago | | |

> it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification

What’s an example of a specific iOS-indication in macOS that makes the OS worse?

bawolff 1 hour ago |

I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets

nwah1 1 hour ago | |

Also, Chromebooks.

Brian_K_White 1 hour ago | | |

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.

I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.

NitpickLawyer 41 minutes ago |

Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.

As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.

ediamondscience 1 hour ago |

I don't know if the BSD folks would be happy to see it mentioned or unhappy that it's at 0%. At least you know that most of those users are human

eurleif 34 minutes ago | |

Netcraft confirms it...

IAmGraydon 1 hour ago |

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

eddythompson80 22 minutes ago | |

Is my understanding of that graph right? if the periodic change is the weekends, that means the total share percentage of requests from Windows and macOS users drops, while Linux increases in share percentage. Linux traffic is stable regardless of weekday/weekend cycles compared to Windows and macOS? Otherwise if there was equal drop in Linux, then the share percentage would be a smoother line. Is that right?

benjaminl 1 hour ago | |

It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.

hparadiz 45 minutes ago | | |

In what universe would I jump from a proprietary OS to another proprietary OS without a damn good reason?

abdullahkhalids 1 hour ago | |

If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.

ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?

cwnyth 40 minutes ago | |

6% is still significant. I'm used to seeing 3-5 in that slot. Hey, I'll take any increase, even a single percentage!

SwellJoe 1 hour ago | |

6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.

It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.

hedgehog 1 hour ago |

https://archive.is/kaef0

rvz 1 hour ago |

Imagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.

paxys 1 hour ago |

Source: vibes

wmf 1 hour ago |

I guess Steam OS counts as Linux?

intothemild 39 minutes ago | |

That's because it is Linux, specifically Arch.

All Linux is Linux.

fragmede 9 minutes ago | | |

Except for Android and ChromeOS. Nix is kinda weird too. But other than that, yeah.